In a normal Republican White House, it would be unnecessary for the press secretary to state, on multiple occasions, within a single briefing, that “The president is a Republican.” But this is not a normal Republican White House, so that is the position in which Sarah Huckabee Sanders found herself on Wednesday.
The need for such clarity follows from recent developments. First, Donald Trump gave House minority leader Nancy Pelosi the debt-ceiling deal she wanted, with no concessions, and then—at Pelosi’s request—reassured Dreamers that they aren’t being deported.
Since then, President Trump has hinted that he would work with Democrats on a permanent solution for DACA without seeking concessions on border security. And then he had Pelosi and Chuck Schumer for dinner on Wednesday night.
As usual there’s dissonance among some Trump boosters. Take Townhall’s Kurt Schlichter, who was incensed about Republicans raising the debt ceiling in 2011, but now says there’s no reason to care about Trump raising it over the objections of Republicans. And then there are the Republicans who have argued that provoking liberals like Nancy Pelosi is its own reward and that conservatives who strike bargains with them are RINOs or squishes or cucks or whatnot, because you simply can’t work with the modern left. The only thing you can do is fight them.
Now many of those same people are saying that it’s the height of wisdom for Trump to be creating a coalition by wooing Pelosi and Schumer.
My own view is that the recent outreach to Democrats represents the lost promise of what a Trump administration could have been.
A year and half ago or so—before he started telling his fans to assault protestors, before he accused George W. Bush of literal treason, before he insinuated that Ted Cruz’s father helped kill JFK—Trump looked like he might be a figure who could scramble the map in an entirely good way.
Imagine an alternate universe where Trump ran a unifying campaign, beat Hillary Clinton, and then swept into office with a charm offensive designed to woo Democratic congressmen and—more importantly—their marginal supporters back home.
President Trump skips Obamacare repeal, because it’s not something he feels strongly about and he knows it’s a briar patch, and instead leads with a giant infrastructure bill. Republicans don’t love it, but they can’t buck the new president. And a bunch of Democrats can’t say no because their constituents—especially union members—would kill them.
With that win in the books, Trump moves on to Ivanka’s family leave act. Congressional Republicans aren’t thrilled with it, again. But they bite down hard because the president’s approval rating is good. And congressional Democrats aren’t thrilled either, because their leftist, antifa base is starting to get angry with them for collaborating with a president they view as illegitimate.
But there are enough Democrats up for election in tough states—Montana, Michigan, North Dakota, Ohio, Pennsylvania, West Virginia, Virginia—that some of them have to vote with Trump if they want to have a shot at holding on to their seats.
And then comes immigration. Trump insists he has to have The Wall, but in the end he gives it up as a bargaining chip. In return, he gets lower overall numbers of legal immigrants and a system based more on merit than chain migration (as in the Tom Cotton bill). He also gets beefed up enforcement at the employer level to go after the companies who profit from illegal immigration. And then he gives citizenship to the Dreamers and permanent legal status much of the rest of the illegal population, while deporting the bad hombres.
Again, there would be some Republicans who might say no to this deal. But there would be a handful of Democrats who had to say yes to it. Not because they like Trump, but because he was staking out popular positions and was in excellent standing with the public.
Now, none of this would have made The Swamp happy. The establishment wings of both parties would have hated Trump’s program. Yet they wouldn’t have had much choice but to go along with it, because Trump would have been triangulating against them both. And he would have been well on his way to creating a real-deal political realignment where he shunted the establishment Republicans to the side and made the party more populist.
The sad fact of the Republican party is that it’s always talking about limited government and social conservatism and freedom and liberty—but the only thing it ever seems willing to shed blood over is cutting capital gains and the top marginal tax rates.
Trump could have changed all of that.
Now, I’m making it all sound easier than it really would have been: There are no straight lines in politics. The opposition always makes adjustments. The media would have fought him every step of the way. Let’s grant all of that.
The point is that there was a way that Trump could have pivoted, worked with the Democrats, sidelined the establishment GOP, gotten big chunks of his program passed, and realigned American politics. None of this would have required that Trump change his policy positions. It just would have required him to be a different person.
But he isn’t. He’s the guy we heard talking to Billy Bush. The guy who casually accuses people of crimes and lashes out on Twitter. The guy who can’t bring himself to single-out Nazis, but will deny someone high government office if they’ve criticized him.
And because of all of that, the only thing Republicans are likely to get between now and the midterms is a tax break on capital gains and the top marginal rate. Just like they would have gotten under Bob Dole, or John McCain, or Mitt Romney.
